Internet Explorer Fuckup Tool
As if anyone out there wanted to hear more computer woe from me - earlier today I installed some piece of software called ABF Internet Explorer Tools (it’s a long story, I wanted to be able to test Flash files without having to delete my browser cache each time, for some reason IE doesn’t seem to re-check SWFs to see whether they’ve been updated).
The software didn’t help me do what I wanted, but it didn’t seem to do any harm either. Until I rebooted. Then every time I tried to open an Explorer window (which includes trying to navigate my hard disk or open Control Panel) the machine would just sit there for an eternity before telling my that Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger had crashed.
Turned out this ABF shit was hooking itself into every Explorer window, and then buggering them up somehow so they never showed. Problem was, because I couldn’t open Control Panel, I couldn’t get to Add/Remove Programs, so I couldn’t get rid of ABF. In the end I did it by going to Start->Run, then browsing through to Program Files/ABF blah blah blah and running the Uninstall program from there (I’m just glad it didn’t bugger up the File->Open dialog too).
A tough one to crack that.
In other news, I was at a lock-in last night, at a pub which shall remain nameless. I had I don’t know how many pints of bitter plus a Laphroaig, didn’t feel very drunk at the time (although I do remember sort of staggering off in search of a chip shop at 1am) but I haven’t half been suffering today (also due to the fact that I smoked my first cigarette in a month or more).